Park Ranging: A Saga, Part 2
Hi everyone! As a volunteer for most of the missing persons’ search parties, I end up participating in a lot of exploration and detective work, as I like to call it. These search parties are organized as to help gather evidence on the whereabouts of whoever is missing at the moment. I highly advise joining one, because you never know if you’re insight will define whether or not they are found. This takes place several months ago, during one of these search parties. We had all gathered together at our starting spot at around 6:00, just before dark, at the kid’s site of disappearance (SOD). Sadly yes, it was a 7 year old boy that had wandered off from his family, and had been missing for a few days since then. He was about 4 feet and 4 inches tall, with brown hair and brown eyes, wearing a Spiderman t-shirt and blue shorts. A very character themed outfit. It seemed pretty straightforward to all of the volunteers, but being a ranger and frequent participant in the search parties gave me a bit of privilege regarding the details, and so I was informed of the...interesting...details. The boy and his family had set out for one of the more popular trails at 11:30 am, on a sunny day. They had 11 family members, all older siblings, two of whom were graduates from high school, and the parents, who were all right next to him when he went missing. No scuffle, no noise, no nothing. Not one of them saw him walk away, and they had all seen him at least a minute before he had disappeared. Just like that, gone in the blink of an eye. Initial Investigation reported that there wasn’t a shred of evidence surrounding the SOD that could help solve where he went. No reports had been filed of shady figures (besides our park hick, Alan, but he’s not important right now), or of a child wandering around by himself. As much of a chatterbox as I am on this, I’m what you call “antisocial” in reality, so I lone-wolfed during this search. I split off from the main group and went off the trail in the opposite direction of the biggest cluster of people. I was around several others, but after a few hours of searching I had parted from them as well. As I was looking on one of the side trails, about a quarter-mile of the SOD, I noticed a patch of color on a nearby pine tree, a short distance from where I stood. It was actually multi-colored, but there was a predominant red that covered it. I knew what I was going to see, but I still prayed that it wouldn’t be. There was a Spiderman t-shirt hanging loosely on the end of a branch, slightly ripped and...dripping. I braced myself for the horror that lied ahead, and walked towards it. As I drew closer, I began to see that the spiderman shirt wasn’t the same one as the one we were told to watch for. There was much less blue, and was a more red themed shirt. Maybe I just remembered it differently? As it turned out, the red theme wasn’t the shirt color. The entire garment was soaked with blood. There was no tissue or any other form of bodily structure, it looked like someone had just poured a vat of the liquid over it. Some of it had even slid down the branch to the base of the tree. It was disgusting, and if I hadn’t been the NoSleep reader I am, I surely would have vomited on the spot. Who would do anything like this? To a child? In broad daylight?! I looked down to where the blood dripped into a small pool on the ground. It had soaked into the earth so much that it physically couldn’t absorb any more, and a literal pool was left. In the middle of said pool were the kids’ glasses, bent, dented, and cracked in several places. I reached down and picked them up to look at. After taking all of that in, I started going through my protocol procedure, and did exactly as I was told during the starting point meet-up. I blew into my alert whistle, and two nearby men immediately rushed over to investigate. It was very convenient that two men just happened to be searching very close to me, the lone wolf, a quarter mile from the SOD. Very convenient and...strange. They were dressed strangely, black shoes, black pants, black tie, jacket, and black...sunglasses. At what was now 9:00 at night. As you may have imagined by now, I was very suspicious of these two, and was not particularly comfortable conversing with them. Nevertheless, they came up to me, and our conversation went something like this: “Hey, I think this is the kid’s shirt, not sure what the rest of this is, but I figured that-“ “Thank you sir, we’ll take it from here.” His formal tone struck me as...odd. This was a volunteer search, and he acted as if this wasn’t his first time dealing with horrible tragedy like this. I began to grow increasingly suspicious, and standoffish. “No, it’s fine. I’ll just stay here and wait for the authorities to arrive, since I was the first witness, and initial locator.” “They’re here. Move.” That last word hit me like a train, and instantly reminded me of a bouncer at a night club. It’s then that I fully realized what I was looking at. They were both six foot, and burly. Very, very, burly. The one that didn’t speak had a buzz cut and a fucking eye patch. He was clearly trying to hide them with the sunglasses, which may have worked at first sight, but was now blatantly obvious. The speaker of the two was bald and poised himself in a way that told me he was the boss here. Of the duo and of me as well. “Now.” I zoned back in, and mentally reminded myself of my average body build. These two were not what they claimed to be, but I was not willing to challenge them on it. I walked away compliantly, turning my head to watch them as I departed. They were taking pictures and pulling out interesting gadgets and electronics that I did not recognize. One pulled out a cell phone and presumably made a call, but I was too far to even hear him speak. It was around this time that the search party had concluded, and in the group meeting it was determined that nothing had been found, and that we would meet again tomorrow at the same time. The two men were not present during that meeting, and I haven’t seen them since. Nothing has been found on the kid since, and if there are any police files regarding leads on the case, I haven’t seen them. Sorry for the rather uneventful story, but this has been one of the strangest occurrences I’ve ever seen. I had heard stories of supposed men in black, but never actually come across anything like it. These two were either thugs, jokers, or...exactly what you think they were. Regardless i didn’t trust them, and I wasn’t going to give them help, and if anything was going to hinder their progress. Which is why I took the glasses and didn’t bring them back. I may end up turning them to the police seeing as I have made no progress with my own analysis, but I dread the thought of those glasses somehow ending up in the hands of the two men, or anyone like them. Please, tell me what I should do with them. Category:Reddit Pastas